How Would You Improve Your Travel Experience?

Earlier this week, I shared a cool new feature from Google that allows you to check your flight status and see all your upcoming travel plans.

I literally just used it to check my flight later this evening!

Features like this fascinate me because such a small thing can make life SO much easier for millions of people. Instead of digging into my inbox or worse, having to find the confirmation code and log into the airline’s website, with 1 search, I was able to get all my upcoming flight info!

While we as passengers (unless you are Richard Branson) can’t go out and buy an airline and make it better, things like Google’s new feature and sites like Hipmunk, HotelsTonights, etc, show that we certainly can improve everything in-between the physical act of flying on a plane. So as part of my school, for the past few months, I’ve been tinkering with the idea of building a travel app.

Travel is one of the few things that I am truly passionate about and from my experiences planning trips, booking trips, and taking trips, there are quite a few inefficiencies that could really be improved upon.

For example, one thing that I have always found annoying is that if you are planning a trip with someone else, there is no easy way to share and collaborate on your potential itinerary.

Many of you may be familiar with this pattern.

You go to Kayak or (insert your preferred travel provider or airline here), find a flight that you think might work but need to check with whomever you are traveling with before you book it. When you go to try and copy the potential flight and paste it in an email, the formatting always gets messed up so you end up just typing it out.

In recent years, especially when I am planning a larger trip with multiple flights and hotels, I now resort to just creating a Google Docs spreadsheet and copy pasting in potential options. It isn’t pretty or very effective BUT it gets the job done and it is sharable with the people I am traveling with.

What Are Your First World Problems?

So creating a web app that helps you organize potential flight & hotel options is one thing I have been tossing around but I would love to hear everyone else’s opinions on the matter.

So my 2 questions are:

1) How do you plan a trip?

Do you use a spreadsheet, Google Docs, Evernote, email, etc.?

2) Are there any travel technologies that you wished someone would build to make your life easier?

For example, someone thought that it would be nice to manage all your frequent flyer accounts in one place, so they built AwardWallet.

Don’t worry if your idea might not make any money, I just want to know things that really bother you as travelers and any solutions you have to fix them.

If you have an answer to either of these questions, please leave a comment below or you are free to email me.

For your participation in this “market research”, I’ll randomly send one person a $50 Amazon electronic gift card based on the responses posted by 5pm (Chicago time) on Monday, March 10. If you want to be considered for the giftcard, remember to use your real email.